Interesting, Non Political News

Serpens said:

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Authorities said Dominguez told police that two of her children were not supervised while they were bathing and that her daughter, Rebecka Zavala, had drowned. Webb County District Attorney Isidro "Chilo" Alaniz said Dominguez and her husband disposed of the body.

Police searched their apartment and found the girl’s remains in a five-gallon container in a bedroom closet, and there appeared to be acid in it, Alaniz said. Authorities began investigating Rebecka’s remains, but it is not yet known if it is ongoing.

Child Protective Services had taken custody of the couple’s four children, ages 1 to 11. In February, Dominguez was sentenced to 10 years in prison for violating the conditions of her probation from a 2016 injury to a child case.

In September 2015, Dominguez’s 9-month-old son sustained six fractures, two to his right arm and two to each leg. She and her husband denied hurting the child, and she pleaded guilty in 2016 and sentenced to 10 years probation.

Since she was charged in the case concerning her deceased daughter during this probation period, she was given 10 years. Her husband and father of the child, Gerardo Zavala-Loredo, 33, is taking a plea deal of 14 years for tampering with evidence of a human corpse, a second degree felony, according to the District Attorney’s Office.

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“Despite decades of tirelessly scouring some of the most familiar and remote places on Earth, biodiversity scientists estimate that more than 90% of nature’s species remain unknown,” Shannon Bennett, PhD, and Academy Chief of Science, said.

In total, 17 fish, 15 geckos, eight flowering plants, six sea slugs, five arachnids, four eels, three ants, three skinks, two skates, two wasps, two mosses, two corals, and two lizards were discovered by scientists across five continents and three oceans. Researchers made the incredible finds by “venturing into Croatian caves, diving to extreme ocean depths, and surveying savanna forests,'' the academy said in a statement.

Among the finds was a bright purple fish dubbed Cirrhilabrus wakanda -- a nod to the Marvel comic and hit movie, Black Panther. The colorful species is found in “Twilight Zone” reefs in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Tanzania, about 260 feet below the surface.

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So far this year the sun has been blank (i.e., no visible sunspots) for 266 days and, barring any major surprises, it’ll reach 269 days early next week which will be the quietest year in terms of sunspots since 1913 when the sun was spotless for 311 days. The sun remains spotless today and has been so 77% of the time in 2019.

Solar minimum is a normal part of the 11-year sunspot cycle, but the last one and the current one have been far deeper than most. One of the consequences of a solar minimum is a reduction of solar storms and another is the intensification of cosmic rays. The just ended solar cycle 24 turned out to be one of the weakest in more than a century – continuing a weakening trend that began in the 1980’s – and, if the latest forecasts are correct, the next solar cycle will be the weakest in more than 200 years.

One of the natural impacts of decreasing solar activity is the weakening of the ambient solar wind and its magnetic field which, in turn, allows more and more cosmic rays to penetrate the solar system. Cosmic rays are of interest to anyone who flies on airplanes (cancer risk). There are also some studies that suggest cosmic rays promote the formation of clouds in the atmosphere; if so, increasing cosmic rays could affect weather and climate.

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One final note of interest, the year 1913 cited earlier for its lack of sunspots on the order of 311 days was a year filled with wild weather extremes including the hottest temperature ever recorded on Earth in Death Valley, CA. For more on the extreme weather of 1913 click here. One such article written on March 30, 1913 reported that “recent observations seem to show that glaciers are gradually disappearing all over the world”.

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